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August 27, 2015 Kranium And Ty Dolla $ign Premiere The Video For "Nobody Has To Know" "This is not your typical dancehall video." Kranium's "Nobody Has To Know" is one of the most enduring dancehall songs this side of the aughts. Since it first dropped two years ago, it's been a bashment mainstay, perfect for dark corners and sweaty summer nights. The Atlantic signee recently recruited Ty Dolla $ign for a new version, and today he's dropping a video to go along with the DL-themed track. In the brightly hued video, Kranium skillfully evades paparazzi on a hoverboard before scooping his (presumably taken) woman and pulling up to a trailer for a middle-of- nowhere desert romp. Ty Dolla $ign is in the cut too, rolling through on a motorcycle with a fat blunt dangling from his lips. "Videos need to be creative and I think we pulled it off. This is not your typical dancehall video,” Kranium told The FADER over email. Accurate. Watch the video above, and hit the clip below for some behind-the-scenes views. June 15, 2015 Is Dancehall Going To Be Mainstream Again? 13 years after Dutty Rock, people in the music industry are ready to make dancehall pop again. Will they succeed? Once upon a time, Sean Paul was among the biggest pop stars in the world. His tour-de-force 2002 LP, Dutty Rock, charted in the Top 10 both in the US and in the UK. Singles like “Gimmie the Light” and “Get Busy” defined a slice of early aughts pop radio and earned the Jamaican singer a guest feature on Beyoncé’s debut album. Not long afterwards, Elephant Man had clubs from Kingston to Kansas signalling the plane and rowing the boat, planting dancehall’s gold, green, and black flag in the so-called mainstream. But the genre vanished from pop culture seemingly as quickly as it had arrived. While it continues to thrive throughout the Caribbean and in hubs for diasporic populations like Toronto, New York, and London, in recent years dancehall’s crossover presence has largely been relegated to the occasional Rihanna or Nicki Minaj track. However, new developments over the past year suggest that, a decade-plus after Dutty Rock, the music industry is ready to make dancehall pop again. Recently, Atlantic Records—the label behind Sean Paul, Elephant Man, and one-time soca star Kevin Lyttle—signed Queens-via-Jamaica dancehall singer Kranium off the strength of his Soundcloud hit “Nobody Has to Know.” Earlier this year, Universal Canada signed Lucas DiPasquale, a (white, non-Jamaican) 19-year-old from Toronto who came to prominence thanks to YouTube acoustic covers of Popcaan songs and an apparent mastery of Jamaican patois. Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar each featured dancehall vocals on their latest projects, both of which are among the biggest rap albums of the past couple of years. Two of 2015’s most- streamed pop tracks, OMI’s “Cheerleader” and Shaggy’s “I Need Your Love,” have the DNA of the artists’ native Jamaica braided into them. Popcaan is making waves globally, with relentless Drake co-signs, a guest vocal spot on Jamie xx’s song-of-the-summer contender, “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),” and, of course, a 2014 FADER cover. Drizzy himself has introduced a cover of Sizzla’s “Dry Cry” to his current set. Kranium, the new Atlantic signee, concurs that there’s something afoot. “For years in dancehall, we had the music but we never had the resources. I’m truly a dancehall man, so me signing to Atlantic, it means a lot to me,” he told The FADER. Pointing to Assassin’s contributions on Yeezus and To Pimp a Butterfly, Kranium says that there’s much to be gained from associations with rap and R&B acts. “Nowadays, you hear [dancehall] getting more airplay. It’s finally drawing people again. Imagine you heard Kranium on a song with Jay Z or Drake? It’s the best of both worlds.” A remix of “Nobody Has to Know” featuring Ty Dolla $ign was recently released by the label, and an enduring, unofficial Chris Brown edit wound up getting Kranium buzz in the clubs over the past year. Both recall the distant-seeming mid-2000s, when major labels orchestrated mutually beneficial trade-offs with dancehall remixes of charting hip-hop songs: Jamaican artists could mine the universal popularity of rap and R&B, while stateside artists had access to the analogous cool of one of the world’s most consistently innovative genres. LaToya Lee, Warner Music’s Director of Worldwide Urban A&R and the person responsible for Kranium’s signing, told The FADER that dancehall is indeed on the cusp of a revival. “Music was missing something that had been a staple for years. What the signing of Kranium does for reggae and dancehall’s influence on mainstream is it makes music exciting again. It opens up the eyes and ears of the creators to a genre and culture they’ve haven’t been exposed to in a while or at all,” she said over email. “It’s important to be ahead of the curve and to be leaders in the resurgence of a genre that has a global influence.” Dre Skull, a New York-based producer and DJ who has worked with some of the biggest acts in dancehall and who releases Popcaan and Vybz Kartel via his Mixpak record label, thinks the uptick in major label interest is indicative of a larger trend. “From Mixpak's perspective, we've been approached by major labels about Popcaan, so they obviously have a lot of awareness of him,” he told The FADER. “Rihanna, she's working on her album, and I know firsthand and secondhand that she's been reaching out to a lot of people in the dancehall world. It could potentially mean a lot.” The renewed links between dancehall and the biggest acts in hip-hop and pop could spur more label investment in the genre, by suggesting that it has the potential to bring in big returns. A push from some of the big artists mentioned above, who are power centers and informal A&Rs in their own right, could help dancehall once again break out of its regional markets. “I have a great hope, like, just on the basis of popular and powerful artists supporting [dancehall],” says Dre, who admits to having a vested interest in the mainstreaming of the genre. “Ultimately, those people are setting an example when they share their love for Jamaican music. They put certain artists on and then put the genre on in general.” Despite that hopefulness, some of the obstacles that prevented dancehall from maintaining its full-scale momentum a decade ago still apply, and will likely continue to be points of contention. Back in the day, says Dre, “labels would sign artists and be really excited about the work they were already doing in Jamaica, but then they wouldn't quite know how to make records with them, market them, or work with them in a beneficial way for all parties.” Acts like Tanto Metro & Devonte and Elephant Man had major label deals that didn’t yield the global longevity they implicitly promised. Labels came to learn firsthand the difficulties of creating new markets for dancehall artists, who had already managed to make themselves stars independently. How, for instance, do you bolster record sales with concerts, and ramp up radio spins with tried-and-true station visits, if the artist can't get a US visa? But there were other factors, too. Growing dancehall’s reach beyond the diasporic strongholds where it has a natural presence often means losing the cultural context that nurtures it. Max Glazer, a Caribbean music DJ of the Federation Sound crew and a longtime industry insider, says the attempts are often met with failure. “Historically, I’ve watched a lot of things stall when you have songs and records that get big to a point and then you’re trying to push them in the Midwest or certain places in the South. When they get to urban radio stations where there’s not naturally a Caribbean population, there seems to be a lot of times that there’s a disconnect,” Glazer said. “Dancehall and Caribbean music is so strong and has—not such a strong record-buying base—but has such a strong base culturally that it’s never going away, but it’s not always easy to break.” A 1991 New York Times story, which attempted to introduce dancehall to the paper’s audience a decade before its global rise, made a similar case. “Reggae reached out to the world in the 1970's and 1980's, while dancehall, with its limited melodic vocabulary and thick accent, seems determined to exclude outsiders,” wrote Jon Pareles, in an explanation of why songs with broadly identifiable Caribbean features—steel pans or sticky melodies—would grab non- Jamaican audiences more readily than the denser, brasher strokes of dancehall. Though the genre has changed a lot since then, often creating its own aesthetic trends and sometimes borrowing from EDM, US hip-hop and R&B, Afrobeat, and other sounds, it still requires a certain cultural literacy that people outside of those aforementioned diasporic cities simply might not grasp. Patois presents a language barrier for a lot of people. So, too, does not being a natural dancer, given that the music rests largely on the art of winding one’s waist to a driving dancehall riddim.

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